


After it's Over

by ozuttly



Category: Kamen Rider Blade
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, learning healthier coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 10:58:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8841886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozuttly/pseuds/ozuttly
Summary: The undead are gone. The fighting is finished, and Mutsuki is normal again. Everything should be normal again.It’s not.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Estirose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estirose/gifts).



Nozomi loves Mutsuki. She’s as sure of it as she is her own name, feels it in her blood and her bones the way only a teenager in love can. She spent so much time worrying over him when he began to act strangely, feeling weak and useless and unable to do anything, but now it’s all over. The undead are gone. The fighting is finished, and Mutsuki is normal again. Everything should be normal again.

It’s not. 

The first night after the end of it all, they stay together. Nozomi’s parents aren’t home, and Mutsuki doesn’t want to be alone with his family, so they go to her place. It’s a very innocent affair, really; she makes him hot chocolate, and they cuddle on the couch watching variety shows until they both get too tired and fall asleep with the tv still on. She’s too tired to dream, too exhausted to even go back to her bedroom. Instead she rests her head on Mutsuki’s shoulder, their hands linked, and closes her eyes. 

She wakes up at three in the morning to Mutsuki screaming, thrashing about in his sleep fighting off some unseen foe. He’s yelling something about the category ace, about how he won’t let it control him again, and Nozomi leaps in to wake him up. He kicks her by accident, but she holds him down and talks to him, tells him that everything is ok. When he does wake up he’s apologetic, he bows his head guiltily, and she smiles softly and lets him know that it’s fine. It’s only understandable that he would have bad dreams after everything that’s happened to him. 

She wraps her arms around his shoulders and holds him until he falls asleep again. He manages to stay asleep through the night this time, though Nozomi has trouble sleeping, just in case he has another night terror. When morning comes, neither of them bring it up. 

***

Nozomi has nightmares too, she finds, the next night when Mutsuki stays at home. She dreams of spiders, of cockroaches and tigers and monsters and all manner of terrible things out to get her. She dreams of being eaten alive by bugs, and she wakes up with tears streaked down her face, her scream breaking off into a muffled sob. 

It takes her a long time to stop shaking, sitting in her bed with her covers pulled up around her like a protective shield. She wants to go to her mother’s bedroom, to wake her up and cry and be consoled. She wants to call Mutsuki and tell him how scary it is. 

In the end, she does neither. Her mother has her own problems, and Mutsuki’s nightmares must be so much worse. She shouldn’t bother him with her own problems when they’re so small in comparison. So she lays down again, ignoring the phantom feeling of giant roach legs against her skin as she falls into a fitful sleep. 

When she sees Mutsuki at school the next day, she smiles brightly despite the fact that she’s exhausted, and he smiles back, and everything goes back to normal.

*** 

When Mutsuki rejoins the basketball team, Nozomi is excited for him. He’s finally getting back into something he used to enjoy, and she grins and cheers for him as loud as she can. She’s happy that he’s starting to get a bit of his life back, after everything he’s been through, and she wants to be as enthusiastically supportive as she can. He grumbles a bit good-naturedly about it, but she can tell from the small smile on his face that he enjoys the attention. 

It’s good. Mutsuki’s happiness is important to her. She knows he’s still haunted by what happened – he’ll stare off into space sometimes for minutes at a time, zoning out in the middle of conversations that were ultimately meaningless but still engaging. He acts depressed sometimes, coming to school with tired bags under his eyes, hardly paying attention to lessons and staring listlessly out the window instead. 

Nozomi doesn’t ask him what’s wrong because she knows what happened, knows that he won’t want to talk about it. She feels useless, in a way, that she can’t do anything to help him, and she hates it. She goes to Jacaranda a few times, drowns her sorrows in food and hot cocoa while Mutsuki goes straight home after school. Aikawa Hajime greets her quietly whenever she comes in, and though she doesn’t know him very well, he always gives her an extra candy cane and a few bonus marshmallows in her hot chocolate. He lets her whine and grumble about how school is hard, and when Amane is around the two of them complain about how useless boys are together. It’s therapeutic, in a way, but it doesn’t actually do anything to help the problem. 

So when Mutsuki starts to cheer up, even a little bit, she is ecstatic, practically over the moon. She tells herself that now she doesn’t have to worry about him as much, and that she’ll be able to get some more sleep herself. Because the nightmares haven’t stopped, even after almost a month, and Nozomi constantly finds herself coming to school tired. She always puts on a smile, for Mutsuki’s sake, because it wouldn’t do for the both of them to be affected by this.

She loves Mutsuki, so she has to be strong for him. It’s the only thing that she can actually do.

*** 

Mutsuki comes by to stay the night again. Nozomi makes popcorn, tries setting up the blankets and pillows on the couch a million different ways before she finally just decides to put them all on the floor instead. Her parents are out again, so they eat convenience store food for dinner, then sit down together to watch a basketball game. She doesn’t really know who’s playing, and she suspects Mutsuki doesn’t either, but he seems absorbed and there’s a little smile on his face. When they finally go to sleep (her in her bed and him on the couch, because love or not they’re still in high school and Nozomi wants to maintain some level of normalcy and propriety) Mutsuki sleeps soundly. 

Nozomi dreams of spiders.

*** 

The end of the school year rolls around, which means exams and Graduation and university applications. Mutsuki is stressed out, and Nozomi is as well, because she doesn’t have the time or energy to comfort him. Instead, she spends all her free time studying, trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life and where she wants to go from here. Mutsuki doesn’t know either, at least, so she’s not the only one who’s aimless, but it’s still frustrating, not knowing what to do. 

It’s frustrating, not being able to focus on Mutsuki’s problems, because at least then she can escape her own. 

The nightmares have settled down somewhat, at least. She no longer dreams of being surrounded by insects, horrible monsters trying to rip her limb from limb. Instead she dreams of being helpless, her limbs tied together by spider silk as Mutsuki lives on without her. 

It’s scary, being left behind, but even more scary than that is the way she feels in the dreams, because in the dreams she finds herself beginning to resent him. She finds herself angry that he’s been able to put his life back together so perfectly, but she’s still stuck, wallowing in mud up to her thighs and unable to move a single step. 

She loves Mutsuki. She doesn’t want to resent him. But she doesn’t have the time to be bothered by nightmares now when she needs to focus on getting into university, so she ignores the dreams the same way she has for the past year. It gets easier with time, but somehow it’s not as comforting as she’d hoped it would be. 

*** 

At their graduation, Mutsuki is shy. Tachibana-san shows up, looking proud and pleased, and though he doesn’t stay long, the smile and nod that he offers makes Mutsuki perk right up. Nozomi feels sour inside, because she’s been smiling and nodding the entire year, but she’s never had quite the same effect.

They go to Jacaranda afterwards, at Nozomi’s insistence. Amane is excited as she congratulates her and asks to see her diploma, and Aikawa-san is smiling ever so slightly from behind the counter. Mutsuki complains as she steals food off his plate, and they laugh together. It’s nice, the most fun Nozomi has had since the start of the exam period, but it’s also tiring. Lately everything is tiring, from applying to universities to studying to watching Mutsuki get his life back on track. It’s getting harder and harder to be happy for him, and Nozomi finds herself exhaling slowly over the piece of cake that she ordered for dessert. 

“Is something wrong?”

Mutsuki is looking at her, fork half-way lifted to his mouth and his eyebrows drawn together in concern. Amane has long-since gone downstairs, and Aikawa-san has retreated to the kitchen to clean up. It’s gotten quite late, Nozomi notices as she looks out the window to see that the sun is beginning to sink below the horizon. The sky is painted in pinks and purples and reds, and it takes her a moment to turn back to Mutsuki, to realize he’s asking her a question. 

“Oh. Yeah, everything’s great!” She exclaims with a smile, because everything should be great. Mutsuki is happy and she should be happy as well. But Mutsuki just stares at her for a long moment, until he finally drops his eyes, looking a bit embarrassed.

“Right. Yeah,” he says, shifting a bit so he can dig around in his pocket. They’d changed into casual clothes after the graduation ceremony, but Nozomi knows what he’s getting as soon as she sees it. “I meant to give it to you earlier, but...”

He awkwardly slides the button from his gakuran across the table. His cheeks are pink, and Nozomi feels her stomach clench up tightly. 

This is good.  
Mutsuki loves her. 

Somehow, she’s never thought of it like that. 

The concept smashes into her like a freight train, that as much as she loves him, and wants him to be happy, that he might want the same for her. She sniffles before she even knows what’s happening, and Mutsuki’s eyes widen in shock and confusion as big, fat tears begin to roll down her cheeks. 

He’s a little scared, she can see, but now that the tears have started they won’t stop, and she’s blowing her nose messily into her napkin. She sobs, openly and loudly, for the first time in a long time, and Mutsuki’s hands hover worriedly over the tabletop. He doesn’t know what to do, and she wants to tell him it’s ok but she’s too busy crying. 

“It was so scary,” she sobs, choking on the words as she blows her nose again. He looks lost, and she bites down hard on her lower lip. “The undead. The fighting. When you went all strange. It was so, so scary. I have nightmares about it all the time, at first I was so scared that you were going to turn weird again and leave!”

Admitting it is hard, but a relief at the same time, even though she knows she looks ugly and pathetic with snort and tears streaked down her face. 

“I thought, I thought I shouldn’t say anything, because it was harder for you, and I just wanted you to be happy, Mutsuki. I thought that if you were happy, that I could be happy, but now you’re happy and you’re back to normal and I’m not. I’m still scared, and--!”

He slides into the booth next to her, and she hadn’t even noticed that he had left his own seat. She jumps as he places one hand awkwardly between her shoulderblades, rubbing her back even though he clearly doesn’t know how to comfort her. She hiccups a few times, covering her face with her hands. 

“Nozomi,” he says softly, like speaking to a startled rabbit, and she hates that he has to speak this way to her. She was supposed to support him, not the other way around. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I love you, Mutsuki,” she says, almost as a whisper. “You were suffering more than me. You had to fight all those monsters, and you had to deal with that scary spider, and that scary belt, and--! I didn’t want to make you worry about me on top of everything else.”

He is quiet as he continues to rub her back, his hand warm and soothing. She looks to the button that is still laying in the middle of the table, to the cake that is half-uneaten and the mess she’s made of the napkin in her lap. She hiccups again, the tears finally beginning to slow. Mutsuki sits with her in silence, comforting her with quiet until her tremors finally stop. 

“Nozomi,” he says finally, his voice unnaturally loud in the empty restaurant, and she looks up at him with puffy eyes and a face ugly from crying. “Nozomi, you being happy is important to me. You were worrying about so many things for so long, and I didn’t even notice. I’m sorry.” 

She wants to tell him that it’s not his fault, that he doesn’t need to apologize, but he doesn’t give her the chance before he continues. 

“We can talk about it, you know,” he says, though he sounds a bit unsure of it himself. “All of it. The parts that you’re scared of, and how we can make it better. If you want to, I want to...” He bites his lower lip this time, turning his face away as a tint of colour comes to his cheeks. “I want to be there for you too, the way you always are for me.” 

She looks at him, words catching in her throat before she can even think to say them. She had been so focused on being there for and supporting him, that the idea that he could support her in turn had seemed unimaginable. Slowly, her eyes travel back to the button, and she slowly reaches out to take it into her hand. 

“You’d be ok... with talking about it?” She asks, because communication has never been Mutsuki’s strong suit. But he smiles awkwardly at her, in a way that is very purely him, and the uneasiness that she’s felt for so long begins to slowly, slowly, ease a little. 

“If that’s what you need. I mean, I also... You know.” He turns away, as though he doesn’t know how to say the words, so Nozomi says them for him. 

“Mutsuki loves me,” she says, and he makes an embarrassed wheezing sound at the ease with which she says it. The words themselves are new, even if the feelings might not be, and Nozomi treasures the way that they bubble up in her chest, warm and fuzzy. Mutsuki stares at the cake on his plate, shyly avoiding her gaze, and she giggles a little. 

“I feel like we’ve both been silly,” she admits, looking down at the button resting against her palm. Mutsuki gives her a look, slightly offended but also more than a little guilty, and she leans against him, resting her head on his shoulder. There’s quiet again, but it’s comfortable this time as she reaches over and grabs onto his sleeve. “I’ll... I’ll give it a try. Talking about it.”

Mutsuki’s mouth twitches into a smile, and he slowly wraps his arm around her, pulling in close. 

“Good. Because, you know, you’re the only one for me, Nozomi. I couldn’t have done anything without you, and... And you deserve to be happy too,” he admits, reaching across the table to grab his plate of cake. He holds up his fork to her, a small piece still on the end, and she grins as she opens her mouth so he can plop it in. 

It’s undeniably sweet.

**Author's Note:**

> Whew, this was a lot of fun to write! To be honest, I found that a lot of Nozomi's character arc in blade relied really heavily on her existing to help Mutsuki, and that's not really healthy, so it was nice to explore how she could learn to rely on him a bit so some more healthy communication could happen there. I hope that this lives up to your expectations!


End file.
